Firemen risk their lives fighting the blaze, often with questionable success. At the high end of a truck-mounted ladder, when a fireman aims a conventional nozzle at a blaze, he can hardly see the blaze because of the thick black smoke coming out of the building. The conventional nozzle, which is so mounted to the ladder as to swivel therefrom, is aimed at the blaze by the fireman and can deliver a huge flow of water. The water jet must be dense since it must span the safe distance to be kept between the fireman and the blaze and must reach the building opening the fireman is aiming at.
Unfortunately, most of the water from the jet usually bounce on a wall opposite the opening or on the ceiling and come right back down, in the basement, through a staircase or an elevator shaft. This is unfortunate since the water that does not contact the portions of the building that are burning does not contribute to the extinguishing of the fire.
Other firemen of the same squad, at the same time, are likely to try to approach the blazing building at ground level. They use hand-held nozzles, necessarily much less powerful because of the recoil created by the ejected jet of water, but more efficient, up to a certain point, because their stream can be manually adjusted so as to deliver a larger spread of fine droplets. But one cannot easily come close to a blazing building without taking serious risks: objects, even walls, can fall on the firemen, or at other moments they can get choked by the smoke.
In either case, the tools the firefighters are conventionally using are not particularly well suited to achieve what is expected from them.
An improvement in firefighting nozzles has been brought forward by Leo J. Grzych in his U.S. Pat. No. 4,700,894 issued on Oct. 20, 1987. In this document, Grzych describes a fire nozzle forming a generally sphere-like water spray pattern. Grzych's fire nozzle assembly presents many drawbacks. First, it is formed of many mechanical pieces that are complicated, and therefore costly, to make. Furthermore, since there is no movement of the water jets created by the nozzle, problems arise should some of the apertures become clogged by foreign matter. Indeed, should that be the case, the sphere-like water spray pattern would be altered and some portions of the room would not get any water.